Aerostar

Abstract

Aerostar Helen Hooper (bio) Nando sits in the back seat of the van and watches the planes come down through the rain, one by one, as they light up the mist, and materialize, and roar overhead. He shuts his eyes as they pass and the vibrations rise up through the tires. He is trying to ignore the determined way his parents hold hands across the emergency brake. They’ve just come from one of their marriage counseling meetings, busy working at the marriage, or whatever the hell they do there, he doesn’t want to know. He himself had been blessedly out of their reach, standing in the drizzle covering second base and striking out and generally contributing to the 9-3 loss to Wakefield. And then his parents had picked him up, driven here to Gravelly Point and compelled him to sit and watch the airplanes bear down on Reagan National Airport. Because, he has been told, this is what they used to do back before he was born, back before the airport was named after a president they despised; which is just another way of saying back when they really liked each other, back back back, when when when. When he thinks about it—and it’s unavoidable, it’s like the persistent odor of some meal already swallowed and forgotten about until the next time you come home and the fumes from cooking it still hang in the air, souring—when he thinks about it Nando figures that they are lonely for something that has petered out. They are nostalgic for a bygone personal era. He feels sorry about this, sorry for them, he really is, but mostly he feels that the burden of this history is not his. For him, there is no before and after, no compare and contrast. He’s just crammed into this Ford Aerostar, his knees jutting up, his [End Page 84] head grazing the ceiling. His jock strap, specifically the protective cup that Coach Lynton makes them wear, pinches. Another plane, one he didn’t see coming, passes overhead, the huge insistent hiss of it sliding down as the plane crosses over the van toward the runway. “Hear that?” says Dad, looking up at the rearview mirror. Nando makes eye contact with him in the mirror and then looks away. “Nope.” “I mean the way the sound changed when it passed overhead?” His dad takes advantage of every opportunity to prove that the stuff he learned in junior high has stuck. Yes, yes. The Doppler Effect, blah, blah, blah. Dad forgets that they had this exact same conversation last time they came to Gravelly Point. But Nando is smarter than his dad, a situation that calls for mercy. “It sounds a little bit disappointed after it passes us,” Mom says. She’d been in the car last time, too, and maybe she even remembers Dad’s little lecture about Doppler, but she allows herself to be pretty vague on such details. Mom has recently announced that she has an artistic temperament. “Don’t you think it sounds disappointed, Nando?” “That’s the red shift,” Nando says. “Correct,” Dad confirms. “Sound waves from something traveling away from us.” “Disappointed,” Mom repeats. Nando tries not to look at Dad, at Mom, and not even at the plane landing, if he can help it. You can’t let yourself get drawn into their fascination with the predictable. The plane passes overhead, the wheels go down, it lands. The raindrops gather and roll down the windshield, painting their itsy-bitsy trails. Such petty dramas, again and again and again. They’re getting divorced. Nando absorbs this from the moment that his parents stop holding hands and turn, in unison, to look at him from between their bucket seats. He knows this even before Dad finishes saying, “There’s something important we need to tell you.” [End Page 85] Not that they go so far as to say the word, divorce, as they go on with it, as all the other words collect and congeal inside the van. “Moving to my own place,” Dad says. “For now,” Mom adds. “That’s right. For now,” Dad agrees...